Despite Downturn, Two Towns Announce Substantial Scholarships

Even in the face of a continuing recession, new scholarship opportunities are being made available to students in a variety of situations. Recently, students in two communities in Michigan, a state hit especially hard by economic problems, have received news of scholarship programs that will give them significant help paying for school, even as the state considers cutting funding to one of its largest merit scholarship awards.

Baldwin, a community in rural northern Michigan, is the first to take advantage of the state's "Promise Zones" program, which allows areas with a high percentage of poor students to use state property tax funds to provide college scholarships for their students. Baldwin plans to offer scholarships of up to $5,000 for up to four years to current high school seniors. Up to nine other high-poverty communities in Michigan are eligible to participate in the program, provided they, like Baldwin, raise money to fund their scholarships for the first two years of awards. The Promise Zone funding, like the state's endangered Michigan Promise scholarship, were inspired by the Kalamazoo Promise scholarship, a full-tuition scholarship award created by an anonymous private donor that allows graduates of Kalamazoo public schools to attend any college in Michigan for four years.

Another Michigan community has also unveiled a substantial scholarship program for its high school students, this time a four-year full-tuition award to Finlandia University for all graduates of public schools in Hancock, a tiny mining town in the state's Upper Peninsula, who gain admission to the college. The scholarship program was created as Finlandia's way of paying the community for the use of a building that the school district no longer needed. Rather than working out a traditional payment plan for the purchase of the building, something complicated by tighter credit requirements, Finlandia proposed a deal that would provide more immediate and tangible benefits to the students of Hancock. The scholarships will be offered to members of Finlandia's current freshmen class and to subsequent graduates of Hancock's schools.

Local scholarships like these exist for communities nationwide, and are likely to seek out inventive ways to find funding, as community members are committed to helping their neighbors succeed. To find out more about scholarship opportunities for students in your area, conduct a free scholarship search.

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